It’s September, which means that literary magazines are shaking off summertime drowsiness and reopening to submissions. Unless your goal is simply to be published in a lit mag, any lit mag, you should make your submission process as strategic as possible.

Much like Newton’s First Law of Physics, there is a key difference between a writing practice with momentum behind it and the considerable amount of energy a writer has to put in to get the ball rolling.

When it comes to planned trilogies, it can be challenging for the second installment to hold the reader’s attention. The overarching conflict is set up in the first book and concludes in the third. Meanwhile, in the second book, there’s often nothing to see for miles around but a whole bunch of rising action.